In countless ways, the study of North American indigenous musical cultures by Westerners has been a crucial element in establishing ethnomusicology as a discipline distinct from historical musicology.Early ethnologists such as Alice Fletcher, Francis Densmore, James Mooney, and Jesse Walker Fewkes laid the foundations for studying music in its cultural context, with Fewkes making the first known field recordings in 1889. Theodore Baker’s Über die Musik der nordamerikanischen Wilden (On the Music of the North American Savages), written in 1881 for the University of Leipzig and published in 1882, is probably the first dissertation on an ethnomusicological topic. And Franz Boas included music in his discussion of Northwest Coast culture, with his student George Herzog playing a pivotal role in the founding of an American branch of ethnographic music research. Although most often viewed through the lens of contemporary theoretical models as dated and perhaps even suspect, this body of research stressed the concept of fieldwork as the primary research method, a principle still central in the work of ethnomusicologists.
In recent years, however, the amount of research done on First Nation music has decreased somewhat, especially south of the U.S.–Canadian border. There are any number of reasons, ranging from research funding issues (it is often easier to get research funding for projects outside of the United States) to working out just how music might fit into the new emphasis on applied indigenous studies seen in many American Indian studies programs. But undoubtedly the most difficult challenge to research is the antipathy of Indians themselves, who have become less than enthusiastic about being “studied” since the mid-1970s. In the time of Densmore, ethnologists could simply show up, and with the reservation agent applying appropriate pressures (or in the case of Densmore a sibling using her charms), recordings could be made, photographs taken, and people’s lives turned into ethnographic description. By contemporary standards, recording technology was the most problematic ethnographic device, and it was common for recordings and transcriptions made during this era to be copyrighted by the Bureau of American Ethnology, as if by recording the songs ethnologists and their funding agencies owned them. But the combination of the civil rights movement (and in Indian country the American Indian Movement) and an increasing awareness of tribal sovereignty changed all that, and many Indians and tribal governments are increasingly wary of “anthros” of any stripe.
Today’s scholars of Native music are the direct intellectual descendants of Densmore and Fletcher, but with some telling differences in methodology, field methods, and outlook. First, contemporary research is much more community based and oriented, with service to Native peoples as a primary goal; second, human subjects concerns and intellectual property issues have come to the disciplinary forefront, making it virtually impossible to simply appear on a reservation or reserve and start recording; and third, Indian people themselves are much more involved in the directions that research is evolving in their communities. It was in this spirit that this volume was conceptualized, with the goals of Native participation in the project and usefulness to multiple constituencies (mainstream academic through tribal college) central to the process of soliciting and assembling the text.
Each essay in this anthology presents a specific issue or set of issues significant to the Native people whose music is being discussed and reflects the diversity of approaches to Native North American music, from non-Native academic scholarship to the experiences of a traditional Native performer of tribal songs. In the interest of providing a balance between the views of cultural insiders and outsiders, a significant number of authors are Native, and one essay has been cowritten by Native and non-Native scholars. The text is ordered so that tribal-specific music is presented first (see Figure I.1 for the geographic locations of the tribal peoples discussed), whereas the last two essays discuss the Pan-Indian topics of pow-wows and country music. But perhaps the most important facet of the collection is how it illustrates the many ways of doing contemporary ethnomusicology in Indian country, from dialogic (von Rosen), coauthored with a Native specialist (Lafferty and Keillor), primarily historiographic (Vander), and fieldwork based (Conlon, Aplin) to using intensive formalistic musical analysis (Draper), linguistic analysis (Sercombe), and interpretive (Browner, Samuels).
In the first essay, “Iglulik Inuit Drum-Dance Songs,” Paula Conlon discusses how Inuit songs provide a way to maintain links with the past through a traditional musical style that dominates not only the Iglulik but also the larger Inuit population from the Arctic East to West: the drum-dance song. In the Iglulik region the man composes the drum-dance song and teaches it to his wife, who in turn teaches it to the other women in the community for public performance in the qaggi, the large ceremonial igloo. At the drum dance, the women sing while the composer dances and plays a single-frame drum, with the drum being hit with a wooden mallet on the frame and not on the skin. This study endeavors to provide a glimpse into Inuit culture through a discussion of the drum-dance songs that so aptly reflect the lives of the people.
Lucy Lafferty and Elaine Keillor’s “Musical Expressions of the Dene: Dogrib Love and Land Songs” describes how the Dene/Dogrib usage of traditional music and dance has been a means by which the Dene have managed to maintain their distinctiveness and culture in their homeland, “Denedeh.” Dene Love Songs, which can be sung by men or women, are concerned with personal relationships, and their texts are frequently humorous. Another type of Dene/Dogrib “Love Song” is used to express “love of the land.” This essay concentrates on Dogrib musical expressions in these forms, how they relate to the worldview of the Dene people, and how they compare to and differ from other traditional musical expressions of the Dene.
In “The Story of Dirty Face: Power and Song in Western Washington Coast Salish Myth Narratives,” Laurel Sercombe illustrates the role of music in the oral literature of the Pacific Northwest Coast region. Often these stories have short songs embedded within the text, by which the various characters speak and sing directly through the storyteller to the audience in a dramatic rendering of the mythological past. Sercombe, who has been involved in various Lushootseed language projects with Coast Salish elder Vi Hilbert for more than a decade, uses her essay to draw critical attention to the essential place of song and language within this dramatic context.
Franziska von Rosen chose to use a dialogic method in her work with singer Margaret Paul in “Drum, Songs, Vibrations: Conversations with a Passamaquoddy Traditional Singer.” The focus of this essay and interview is the current Maliseet/Passamaquoddy musical revitalization as experienced and articulated by Paul, who with a small group of traditionalists from St. Mary’s reserve has been at the heart of this revival—bringing back the drum, the songs, the ceremonies, and the way of life that are respectful of these traditions. This discussion centers on those issues that Paul views as vital to an understanding of the music.
“Identity, Retention, and Survival: Contexts for the Performance of Native Choctaw Music” is the result of David E. Draper’s work with traditional Choctaw communities in Mississippi during the 1970s and ’80s. Illustrated with dense musical transcriptions, Draper’s thesis centers on his concept of the “occasion” in Choctaw music, in which musical performances are inexorably linked with specific community events. According to Draper, without the event, or occasion, to spur performance of specific musical repertories, the music no longer has meaning within its community context, and its performance often ceases. Draper’s theoretical linkage between music and event is comparable to the anthropological theory of concomitant variation.
In “This Is Our Dance”: The Fire Dance of the Fort Sill Chiricahua Warm Springs Apache,” T. Christopher Aplin discusses the role of music in retaining identity in the diasporic Apache community of Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Descendants of the Chiricahua Apache who were exiled from Arizona to Oklahoma following the defeat of Geronimo in 1886, the Fort Sill Apache struggle with language loss and maintaining themselves as Tiné People in a sea of southern Plains tribes such as the Kiowa and Comanche, whose pow-wow and Gourd Dance cultures threaten to erode the distinctiveness of Chiricahua ceremonialism and musical expression.
Judith Vander, in “The Creative Power and Style of Ghost Dance Songs,” gives a very brief description of the Ghost Dance religion, and then focuses on two main points. First, Ghost Dance performance rests on an underlying premise: a belief that dance, music, and poetic song texts have the power to affect the spiritual world. Second, she emphasizes that the simple-complex style of Ghost Dance music and poetic song texts is a remarkable artistic achievement.
My own essay, “An Acoustic Geography of Intertribal Pow-wow Songs,” concerns the broad binary of Northern-Southern by which scholars (and Indians) tend to group pow-wow musical styles. I argue that somewhere between Northern-Southern and tribal-specific singing there are smaller regional modes of vocal performance that can be discerned by a deep listening for musical elements such as vocal timbre, range, and ornamentation usually overlooked in ethnographic accounts of music, and that all too often the songs themselves are lost within the ethnographic details.
Finally, in “Singing Indian Country,” David Samuels writes about the processes by which Anglo-American country western music has been “Indianized,” to the point where it sonically represents Indians as well. Samuels asks, “How can the sounds of white, hardscrabble, blue-collar, evangelical Christian, sometimes racist ideologies be embraced by the very people against whom those ideologies have often been so destructively employed?” Problematizing the old theoretical warhorse of “acculturation,” Samuels foregrounds the notion of Indian agency in the choice of what musical genres of the dominant society are to be embraced and recontextualized to represent the Native experience.
In conclusion, I would like to note that David Draper’s essay was first published in 1980 under the title “Occasions for the Performance of Native Choctaw Music” in the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology’s Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology 3. This newly titled version is a significant revision of that essay, which I felt deserved a broader audience. All other contributions were written specifically for this anthology.
Figure I.1. Map of North America. Courtesy of Tara Browner.